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February 3, 2015

Top Ten Tuesday (78)

This week's topic is top ten genre books I can't believe I haven't read yet. I have this problem with YA Fantasy where I want to read all of them in theory, but am so hesitant to reach for one when it's time to pick my next book. I don't know why this happens to me, because I really enjoy them when I read them, but they're just not my first go to. Here are ten (probably really awesome) Fantasy reads I can't believe I haven't picked up yet.

Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets
of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, a ruthless
lunar people watch, waiting to make their move. No one knows that Earth’s fate
hinges on one girl.

Cinder, a gifted mechanic, is a cyborg. She’s a second-class citizen with a
mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s
illness. But when her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai’s,
she suddenly finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle, and a
forbidden attraction. Caught between duty and freedom, loyalty and betrayal,
she must uncover secrets about her past in order to protect her world’s future.

Every year, Blue Sargent stands next to her
clairvoyant mother as the soon-to-be dead walk past. Blue herself never sees
them—not until this year, when a boy emerges from the dark and speaks directly
to her.His name is Gansey, and Blue soon discovers that
he is a rich student at Aglionby, the local private school. Blue has a policy
of staying away from Aglionby boys. Known as Raven Boys, they can only mean
trouble.But Blue is drawn to Gansey, in a way she can’t
entirely explain. He has it all—family money, good looks, devoted friends—but
he’s looking for much more than that. He is on a quest that has encompassed
three other Raven Boys: Adam, the scholarship student who resents all the
privilege around him; Ronan, the fierce soul who ranges from anger to despair;
and Noah, the taciturn watcher of the four, who notices many things but says
very little.For as long as she can remember, Blue has been
warned that she will cause her true love to die. She never thought this would
be a problem. But now, as her life becomes caught up in the strange and
sinister world of the Raven Boys, she’s not so sure anymore.

Tally is about to turn sixteen, and she can't
wait. Not for her license - for turning pretty. In Tally's world, your sixteenth
birthday brings an operation that turns you from a repellent ugly into a
stunningly attractive pretty and catapults you into a high-tech paradise where
your only job is to have a really great time. In just a few weeks Tally will be
there.

But Tally's new friend Shay isn't sure she wants to be pretty. She'd rather
risk life on the outside. When Shay runs away, Tally learns about a whole new
side of the pretty world and it isn't very pretty. The authorities offer Tally
the worst choice she can imagine: find her friend and turn her in, or never
turn pretty at all.
The choice Tally makes changes her world forever...

Sixteen-year-old Kaye is a modern nomad. Fierce
and independent, she travels from city to city with her mother's rock band
until an ominous attack forces Kaye back to her childhood home. There, amid the
industrial, blue-collar New Jersey backdrop, Kaye soon finds herself an
unwilling pawn in an ancient power struggle between two rival faerie kingdoms -
a struggle that could very well mean her death.

Elisa is the chosen one.
But she is also the younger of two princesses, the one who has never done
anything remarkable. She can't see how she ever will.
Now, on her sixteenth birthday, she has become the secret wife of a handsome
and worldly king—a king whose country is in turmoil. A king who needs the
chosen one, not a failure of a princess.
And he's not the only one who seeks her. Savage enemies seething with dark
magic are hunting her. A daring, determined revolutionary thinks she could be
his people's savior. And he looks at her in a way that no man has ever looked
at her before. Soon it is not just her life, but her very heart that is at
stake.
Elisa could be everything to those who need her most. If the prophecy is
fulfilled. If she finds the power deep within herself. If she doesn’t die
young.
Most of the chosen do.

When Sam met Grace, he was a wolf and she was a
girl. Eventually he found a way to become a boy, and their loved moved from
curious distance to the intense closeness of shared lives.now.That should have been the end of their story.
But Grace was not meant to stay human. Now she is the wolf. And the wolves of
Mercy Falls are about to be killed in one final, spectacular hunt.forever.Sam would do anything for Grace. But can one boy
and one love really change a hostile, predatory world? The past, the present,
and the future are about to collide in one pure moment - a moment of death or
life, farewell or forever.

In a discontent kingdom, civil war is brewing.
To unify the divided people, Conner, a nobleman of the court, devises a cunning
plan to find an impersonator of the king's long-lost son and install him as a
puppet prince. Four orphans are recruited to compete for the role, including a
defiant boy named Sage. Sage knows that Conner's motives are more than
questionable, yet his life balances on a sword's point -- he must be chosen to
play the prince or he will certainly be killed. But Sage's rivals have their
own agendas as well.

As Sage moves from a rundown orphanage to
Conner's sumptuous palace, layer upon layer of treachery and deceit unfold,
until finally, a truth is revealed that, in the end, may very well prove more
dangerous than all of the lies taken together.

Evie O’Neill has been exiled from her boring
old hometown and shipped off to the bustling streets of New York City—and she
is pos-i-tute-ly ecstatic. It’s 1926, and New York is filled with speakeasies,
Ziegfeld girls, and rakish pickpockets. The only catch is that she has to live
with her uncle Will and his unhealthy obsession with the occult.As Evie jumps headlong into a dance with a
murderer, other stories unfold in the city that never sleeps. A young man named
Memphis is caught between two worlds. A chorus girl named Theta is running from
her past. A student named Jericho hides a shocking secret. And unknown to all,
something dark and evil has awakened.

Evie worries he’ll discover her darkest secret:
a supernatural power that has only brought her trouble so far. But when the
police find a murdered girl branded with a cryptic symbol and Will is called to
the scene, Evie realizes her gift could help catch a serial killer.

Kami Glass loves someone she’s never met . . .
a boy she’s talked to in her head ever since she was born. She wasn’t silent
about her imaginary friend during her childhood, and is thus a bit of an
outsider in her sleepy English town of Sorry-in-the-Vale. Still, Kami hasn’t
suffered too much from not fitting in. She has a best friend, runs the school
newspaper, and is only occasionally caught talking to herself. Her life is in
order, just the way she likes it, despite the voice in her head.

But all that changes when the Lynburns return.The Lynburn family has owned the spectacular and
sinister manor that overlooks Sorry-in-the-Vale for centuries. The mysterious
twin sisters who abandoned their ancestral home a generation ago are back,
along with their teenage sons, Jared and Ash, one of whom is eerily familiar to
Kami. Kami is not one to shy away from the unknown—in fact, she’s determined to
find answers for all the questions Sorry-in-the-Vale is suddenly posing. Who is
responsible for the bloody deeds in the depths of the woods? What is her own
mother hiding? And now that her imaginary friend has become a real boy, does
she still love him? Does she hate him? Can she trust him?

On Roanoke Island, the legend of the 114 people
who mysteriously vanished from the Lost Colony hundreds of years ago is just an
outdoor drama for the tourists, a story people tell. But when the island faces
the sudden disappearance of 114 people now, an unlikely pair of 17-year-olds
may be the only hope of bringing them back. Miranda, a misfit girl from the
island’s most infamous family, and Phillips, an exiled teen criminal who hears
the voices of the dead, must dodge everyone from federal agents to long-dead
alchemists as they work to uncover the secrets of the new Lost Colony. The one
thing they can’t dodge is each other.

About

remembers the dark times when the YA shelf at her library was three shelves of Sweet Valley University and not much else. What she's trying to say is that she loves teen books even though she hasn't actually been a teen in a little while. Feel free to drop her a line at the links below.